


Artisan

by Quite an Irregular Thing (Purna)



Category: God's Own Country (2017)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 11:01:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14810090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Purna/pseuds/Quite%20an%20Irregular%20Thing
Summary: A farm is hard work. Saving one will take a little luck too.ETA: Nowtranslated into Russian by RusPlot. How cool is that?





	Artisan

“Fuck,” Johnny bellowed, shaking his hand out to ease the sting. He was trying to get a better look at the injury when all of a sudden Gheorghe was there, a gentle hand on Johnny’s wrist. Gheorghe tugged him closer, examined the angry red mark on Johnny’s pinched hand.

“Nothing broken,” Gheorghe reassured, and leaned over to brush a kiss onto Johnny’s palm. Johnny felt heat wash over his face and had to close his eyes a moment. Gheorghe had kissed his hands more times than he could count, kissed parts of Johnny’s body far more intimate than that, and yet it still made him go all daft and flushed. It’d be embarrassing, if Johnny still let himself feel that sort of thing about anything Gheorghe wanted to do to him.

Gheorghe lifted his head, and gave Johnny a _look_. He said, all gentle like, “You said you read the instructions. The lattice wall can pinch when it’s opened up.”

“Stupid yurt,” Johnny grumbled. “Who stays in a fucking tent in fucking Yorkshire?”

“People who’ll pay us a lot of money for the privilege,” Gheorghe said evenly.

He’s patient, so patient, Johnny thought with an odd twist in his belly, staring down at his own mucky boots. Gheorghe waited him out, caught Johnny’s eye finally, and returned the smile Johnny couldn’t hold back.

*

It was an American who made them sort of internet famous and helped save the farm. She hand-dyed yarn and had a podcast and an Instagram, both with huge followings, though Johnny didn’t know any of that back then. Jenny-from-Oregon (as she introduced herself and Johnny kept calling her) had stayed a week that first time.

Gheorghe had drawn her to their door, Gheorghe and his cheese. It was what got the pair of them talking, like, about the beasts and the farm. Gheorghe told her about Dad, Johnny suspected, though Gheorghe never said. That was apparently enough to lure a vacationing American from a village market stall all the way out to their farm.

Johnny supposed he couldn’t blame her, he himself had once gone all the way to Scotland for Gheorghe.

“Paying guest,” Gheorghe told Nan, in that guileless way that got him his way most times. Gheorghe had his thinking face on, like when he was making cheese or soothing a fretful ewe, sussing things out.

Paying guest, my arse, Johnny thought, but didn’t say aught against it.

Jenny-from-Oregon’s visit hadn’t started off too grand, in Johnny’s estimation. It’d pissed buckets for three days straight, and Jenny’s hire car got stuck in the mud. Dad was sleeping more and talking less every day, Nan was Nan, and Johnny wore surly like he’d been bred for it. Come think of it, he had.

But then the rain stopped and the sun came out. It turned the landscape from forbidding to scenic, golden green moor and blue sky. Gheorghe was completely himself, charming and (Johnny stifled another flush at the secret thought) beautiful.

Dizz, one of Gheorghe’s orphans, followed Jenny around like a dog whenever they got near, and melted her city-bred heart in the way of many a rural convert. She took photograph after photograph, of the beasts, of the rolling Dales, of Gheorghe, Nan, Dad, and Johnny.

Of Johnny and Gheorghe together, too close for just mates, and Johnny looking besotted because that’s the way of things now. She asked their okay to put that one out on the internet, and Johnny hesitated. At the hopeful look that Gheorghe sent his way, Johnny gave in.

“S’fine,” Johnny said, soft enough for Gheorghe’s ears only at first, and then repeated it louder for Jenny.

Johnny figured their nonexistent mobile coverage would nark anyone off, but she seemed to take it in stride. Jenny couldn’t post her pictures in the evenings like she said she usually did, but she just curled up by the fire with a bag of wool and needles.

She was knitting, of all things, just as Nan used to. The memory of it was like Johnny’s memories of Mam, old and faded. Back when they weren’t so skint, before everything got hard and cold and just getting on with it became nigh unbearable.

Until Gheorghe, that is.

Gheorghe was sitting in his chair, his head bent towards the hearth. His dark hair was lit in changing colours from the firelight; Johnny itched to push his fingers through those thick curls.

Right now though, Gheorghe was deeply absorbed in conversation with Jenny, who talked and knitted at the same time with ease, fingers quick and sure. She had posh needles and all, coloured wood like a rainbow.

Johnny didn’t let the jealousy that stirred deep inside him take over. They were solid as houses, he and Gheorghe, and he was done playing silly beggars with the love of his life.

It helped that Gheorghe and Jenny were definitely not flirting. Their nattering on reminded Johnny more of Dad down the pub than anything else. Dad was already tucked up in bed sleeping, else he’d have liked it, Johnny thought. Better than Johnny did, probably, all the talk of wool, merino and BFL and Swaledale, and commercial prices for fleece. Jenny was saying something about an emerging artisan crafting market for Yorkshire woolens, and it all made Johnny’s eyes cross.

When he was talking to Jenny, Gheorghe sounded almost like Robyn’s uni mates. He used words he avoided when it was just Johnny and him, because Johnny had to join the real world instead of sitting on his arse in a lecture hall. It felt like poking at a bruise, listening in, so Johnny stood up all of a sudden.

“John?” Gheorghe interrupted the flow of conversation to turn his attention to Johnny. He could always sense Johnny’s moods, and now he was looking up at him, a question in his dark eyes.

Johnny softened a bit. It wasn’t their fault that he didn’t get much schooling, and Gheorghe was with him, not some clever college git.

“S’fine. Lager?” he asked as an apology, including Jenny in the offer. She nodded, smiling down at her knitting.

“I’ll help,” Gheorghe said. He followed Johnny into the kitchen, and, taking advantage of their relative privacy, crowded him up against the counters. He cupped a hand over the back of Johnny’s neck, and pulled him into a kiss, soft and wet. It was in no way chaste, but it was gentle and firm, more grounding than arousing. When Gheorghe drew back from the kiss, he rested his forehead against Johnny’s.

“I think she can help us,” Gheorghe whispered. “She’s got ideas, and she’s got connections.”

Johnny kept quiet for a moment, then gave in to the impulse to lay his hand on Gheorghe’s chest, to feel the solid warmth of him through the weave of his jumper. Gheorghe covered Johnny’s hand with his own, but held his peace, letting Johnny get his head sorted.

Johnny sighed, a twist of shame heating his gut. On the coach ride back from Scotland, he’d sworn to himself he’d do anything to keep Gheorghe by his side, be more open and honest, talk more. But here he was, falling back into his old ways.

“I know that,” Johnny said finally. “I’m just being daft. I trust you, Gheorghe Ionescu. Trust you more than I trust meself, like.”

*

Things seemed to fall into place after Jenny’s visit. She put them in touch with Caro, the owner of a local yarn shop who was looking for a reliable supplier of Yorkshire wool, and they firmed up a deal. Caro in turn inquired if they wanted to host farm tours, as part of the local wool and sheep festival and that became a regular thing.

Around the same time, Johnny got talking to Wensleydale breeders. One of Dad’s old mates had been their entry there.

“Long staple fleece, Johnny lad. Fine prices for it,” Dad’s mate had said. “Tried to get Martin interested, but he’s set in his ways, like,” he added, telling Johnny naught he didn’t know already.

 “Jenny says that knitting Instagram can’t get enough of us,” Gheorghe said, looking up from his mobile. They were leaving the village, still in range of a mobile network. Gheorghe got side-eyed in the pub, so they hadn’t stayed long after talking to Dad’s mate. Gheorghe said it didn’t bother him, but it definitely bothered Johnny, to the point he nearly got them barred. Again.

“Knitting Instagram. What’s that when it’s at home then?” Johnny said. As with much else in his life, he’d always felt a bit left by the wayside when it came to the internet, and it made him sarky.

“They’re the people who will pay 20 quid for a ball of Yorkshire wool.”

Johnny couldn’t argue with that, he admitted.

The wool and sheep tours brought fresh eyes to the farm, and inspired them to smarten up the place a bit. Hinges got oiled, paint freshened up, and flowers planted in pots by the door.

Gheorghe really threw himself into the face lift, finding projects for them to do in the scant spare moments the farm left them. Nesting, Johnny thought, but didn’t dare voice the thought aloud.

They replaced a crooked, rotting door in one of the outbuildings. After they were done and the new door swung easily on its hinges, Gheorghe smiled. It was that tiny hint of a smile that always gave Johnny a bit of a turn, in a good way, brought heat to his skin, a flush to his ears.

Their eyes met, and they’d never needed words for this, but Johnny still breathed, “Gheorghe,” strangled and broken-like. He pushed a willing Gheorghe backwards into the building and slid to his knees at Gheorghe’s feet.

Before Gheorghe, sex had always been a rush to completion, fast and furious. Like eating, he was filling a need, survival. Gheorghe had changed all that, slowed him down, showed him the pleasures of taking care, taking time, with both eating and sex.  

Now Johnny put those lessons to use, stroking Gheorghe through his clothes first with teasing fingers. Gheorghe’s breathing grew louder, rougher, but Johnny didn’t move things along yet. He kept his hand moving slow and steady until he had Gheorghe moaning. It was only then that he pulled Gheorghe’s cock out and used his mouth.

_Cock_ , Johnny thought as he swallowed Gheorghe down, and in his head it sounded as Gheorghe said it, accented, amused.

*

Time passed.

Gheorghe and Johnny shared their small room, their tiny bed. It didn’t need to be said that farms were hard work, and they went to bed too shattered for sex every night. But they made a good stab at it, as Johnny said to Gheorghe when they were doing the cows’ teas one evening.

Johnny said the word _stab_ with a filthy snicker, and Gheorghe had rolled his eyes, but smiled that little smile that always made Johnny ache.

It flooded him then, all of a sudden like, just how good it was to have Gheorghe close by, working side-by-side with him. What he was feeling obviously showed on his face, because Gheorghe crowded close and kissed him silly.

The cows didn’t seem to mind.

Nan stopped making little remarks when she found their clothes jumbled together on the floor, shirts tangled like vines. They tried to be neater, they really did, but sometimes they couldn’t help themselves. He and Gheorghe had lit each other up from the very first time they met, and that didn’t show any signs of changing.

Life happened, and that meant things changed, some for the good, some bad.

Dad took ill one winter. It seemed mild at first, but persistent. He always seemed just about to shake it off but never quite could. Pneumonia took him in the end, fighting for his last breath like he’d fought for everything his whole life.

After the funeral, Nan slipped off to her room, pale as a ghost but dry-eyed, her tongue sharper than ever. Gheorghe said to leave her be, and then pulled out the scotch. A glass in, and Gheorghe started talking, slow and quiet-like, almost like he was talking to himself.

“You never know how it’ll show its face,” he said, not looking over at Johnny. “Grief, I mean.”

“I thought it were simple, like,” Johnny found himself saying through the bleak, angry tightness in his throat. “Just sadness. But it’s not.”

Gheorghe topped up their glasses. “No,” he sighed. “No, it’s not.”

If not for Gheorghe by his side in the days and weeks after that…Johnny shied from completing the thought. Quite enough of that, in the words of Nan.

They got good news not long after Dad’s funeral, a tarnished silver lining if there ever was one. A posh bistro down in Manchester wanted all the cheese Gheorghe could make, for a premium price. It freed up time previously spent doing market days, and supposedly they would get a mention in the menu.

Johnny had the dark thought that it’d be the name _Saxby_ , not _Ionescu,_ that would get mentioned in the end, but he didn’t say anything to Gheorghe. Gheorghe knew all too well how things were. Before Gheorghe, Johnny himself wouldn’t have noticed or cared, he knew. Funny how that worked.

Heritage British wool became the mainstay of the farm, their trademark, bringing better prices and easing the money woes even more. They expanded the wool tours beyond the wool festivals, offering them all summer.

Johnny and Gheorghe had their worst fight since Scotland a few months after Dad died. It was probably a reaction to that, to how Gheorghe kept _coddling_ , Johnny thought in a rare moment of introspection.

And Johnny had never had a partner, much less lived with one. It was hard, even with someone he craved as much as he craved Gheorghe. There was shouting and slammed doors, and then Johnny had taken himself off for a walk and a smoke.

An hour and two cigarettes later, and Johnny wanted to punch something. Gheorghe wouldn’t up and leave again, Johnny knew, but it was like his insides hadn’t quite got the message. They wanted reassurance, a kiss and a cuddle maybe, as though Johnny had never been the kind of man who shunned both.

It just made it worse, Johnny realized. Like gulping for air after swimming to the bottom of the pond, he was greedy for the lack.

He stubbed out his cigarette then and headed back to the house. Headed back to Gheorghe, who gave him a kiss and a cuddle both, and then a little more.

Makeup sex really was fantastic.

*

Two years after their first wool tour, Jenny asked if their farm could host a knitting retreat. Jenny and her mates would teach knitting and spinning to a bunch of knitters, who mysteriously valued fresh air and sheep up close and personal over a pub in walking distance and internet service. The knitters would stay down in the village, their food catered through the pub, but they’d want tours about the farm, and shelter for the classes, space for seating and the equipment.

Johnny blinked and let Gheorghe field the question.

A long conversation with Jenny and a consult with Nan later, and “Yes,” was their answer, which started a scramble for accommodations.

Gheorghe tracked down the owner of a local glamping venture selling off her business. Yorkshire charm had worn thin, and the owner was heading back to London. Johnny personally saw no glamour in camping in the first place, so trying to combine the two was a lost cause from the start.

“A decent takeaway curry again,” she said. She sounded more wistful and eager than disgruntled. They sweet-talked her into bargain prices for some of her yurts.

Johnny wasn’t sure what he expected—Jenny wasn’t that much older than Gheorghe, after all—but the group of women (and one man, to Johnny’s poorly concealed surprise) who arrived for the knitting retreat wasn’t made up of grey-haired grannies. The knitters were younger than he’d expected, and edgier: tattoos and piercings instead of support stockings and pearls.

Gheorghe charmed them all, of course, in the first afternoon. He smiled, and shyly introduced them to Dizz, and the knitters melted.

Johnny wondered if he should try to be more like Gheorghe, warm, social. He took Jenny aside and asked her if he was putting everyone off with his silence, if he should try to be friendlier. She laughed and said something about gruff Yorkshiremen and fulfilling expectations.

“What?” Johnny asked, frowning a bit. He didn’t care to be laughed at.

Jenny sobered and shook her head. “Just be yourself, Johnny.” She tilted her head, giving him a thoughtful look. “Did you know I used to be a lawyer? Corporate law, real high-flyer.”

Fancy, Johnny almost said, but something stopped him. Her gaze had turned inward, and now the mockery was real, but aimed at herself.

After a stretch of silence, Johnny made a considering sound. “So what happened?”

Jenny’s face went still, a little bleak. “My mom died, quite suddenly. Everything seemed fake after that. Except knitting. Making something real with my own two hands was peaceful. Fiber therapy, you’ll hear knitters call it. Real, that’s this country all over. You, Gheorghe, Dierdre, this farm, you’re part of it. Genuine.”

“Not much call for putting on airs ‘round here,” Johnny said. They were Nan’s words internalized, he realized with a sort of mild resignation.

“Exactly,” Jenny said, as if he’d said something profound.

*

Johnny convinced Gheorghe to tag along with Jenny and most of the knitters out to the pub one evening. They might like it up at the farm, lonely beauty and all, but they did seem to like their pints as well.

A few of the knitters started hitting the hard stuff, and Johnny hoped for their sakes that knitting with a hangover wasn’t as bad as farming with one. He himself spent more time playing darts with Gheorghe than he did drinking. Johnny was well past the times when he needed that sort of escape.

Johnny was ordering another pint at the bar when one of the knitters joined him. She tilted her head, looking curiously at him and then the dart board. Katie, Johnny thought she was called.

“Don’t mind me,” she said. Her accent placed her as one of the Americans. “I used to watch my mom and dad play darts and felt like reminiscing.”

She was a short lass, dressed in boots and leather like Robyn used to do sometimes when she was in a mood. A scarf of some spider-web fine wool, fluffy white and knitted into fancy lace, was looped around her neck. It was almost a shock to see it layered atop her rough motorcycle jacket.

She noticed him eyeing it and waved one end of it at Johnny. “Like it? Designed it myself,” she said, smiling at him warmly.

“S’nice,” Johnny said. A little desperate, he looked over towards Gheorghe, who was collecting the darts from the board. Gheorghe was the charming one, not him.

She must have misinterpreted his glance, because she leaned back a bit, her eyes widening.

“Whoa, sorry, not trying to hit on you. I know you’re taken. And I’m married, anyway,” she said, laughing a little.

Johnny glanced down at her hands, free of any sort of wedding band.

“Yeah, I don’t wear a ring,” she said, wiggling the fingers of her left hand at him. “I’m a dentist, lots of gloves and hand washing.”

“Aye,” he said. “Makes sense.”

She smirked. “Actually, that’s just what I tell people. I don’t wear a ring because I don’t want to, plain and simple. I was never really into the whole wedding thing, always struck me as kind of an archaic institution, you know?”

“Never much thought about it, I guess,” Johnny said with a shrug.

“Even with—” She nodded over at Gheorghe.

Johnny blinked, and looked over to meet Gheorghe’s gaze. He was watching them with an easy expression on his face and he met Johnny’s eyes with a private smile.

“He’s already me better half,” Johnny said without really intending to. The words seemed to spring out the place inside him that always felt better when he was with Gheorghe. He could feel that daft expression spread over his face, but he didn’t bother to stop it.

*

After the knitting retreat ended, Jenny and her mates packed up and left, all smiles and already planning for next year. The extra cash from the retreat put them even more into the black, and Gheorghe was already talking about improving the accommodation for them, fancying up the yurts and the like.

Farm work left little space for introspection, but Johnny couldn’t stop thinking about Katie the dentist, about archaic institutions. It all gave Johnny ideas.

Johnny could picture it: up above the lambing shed, at the top of the hill Gheorghe had once climbed, with Johnny right behind him. They could see the whole world from that spot, seemed like.

In his head, there were no clouds to mar the view, and Johnny had planned to wait for a sunny day. But in the end, Yorkshire weather did exactly as it pleased and the skies stayed overcast. On the second week of rain and clouded skies, they were up working on the lambing shed anyway, and Johnny couldn’t wait.

He caught Gheorghe’s attention and jerked a nod towards the hilltop.

“John?” Gheorghe said, but readily followed when Johnny went to scramble over the drystone wall.

Johnny raced up the hill and stood there, chest heaving, as Gheorghe caught him up. They could see…nothing but mist and clouds. It wasn’t quite the view Johnny had hoped for.

But the damp cooled his face and made Gheorghe’s hair curl even more. Gheorghe was looking at him quizzically, but smiling just the same.

It was, just as Gheorghe had once said, beautiful.

Johnny had considered kneeling for this part, but the field was rocky as anything, and his knees were already aching and sore from working on the shed roof. He’d stand to do this, thank you very much. He didn’t think Gheorghe would mind.

 So he just took Gheorghe’s work-stained hand in his own, and said, “This time it _is_ like I’m asking you to get wed, Gheorghe Ionescu.”

And so they did.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I obsessed over these guys after watching the movie a few months back, and Johnny wouldn’t leave me alone until I wrote this. Grain of salt time: the only time I’ve been to a sheep farm was during an equestrian vacation in rural Wales, where the sheep definitely outnumbered the people. I don’t know anything about the business side of sheep farming. Not from the UK, so feel free to correct any American slips. 
> 
> A/N2 for the knitters out there: I’m a knitter and a follower of knitting Instagram, but again, don’t know anything about the business side of things. You probably caught the Baa Ram Ewe inspiration here (“Knit happy. Knit Yorkshire.”). Jenny’s needles aren’t actually that posh. They’re Jenny’s travelling needles; she was too scared to bring her nice ChiaoGoos for fear of TSA confiscation. Which is more backstory than anyone needed, ahem.


End file.
